


The Warmth in the Cold

by 94BottlesOfSnapple



Category: Zero Escape (Video Games)
Genre: Comfort, Established Relationship, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-26
Updated: 2016-07-26
Packaged: 2018-07-26 23:09:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7594048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/94BottlesOfSnapple/pseuds/94BottlesOfSnapple
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-999, Pre-VLR</p>
<p>Alice in an unguarded moment, away from the eyes of enemies or proteges  or superiors. </p>
<p>Doubts are beginning to creep up on her, but there's still one voice that can chase her troubles away, if only for a while.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Warmth in the Cold

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not really sure where this came from except that I wanted Alice to have a girlfriend. And I know a lot of people ship her with Clover, but I didn't want their power dynamic (very clearly mentor/mentee) intruding, because I don't think Alice allows herself to be entirely vulnerable around Clover since she has to be the one in charge. Not that the ship is bad, just that it's not what I wanted to write, I guess.
> 
> I think this might actually be the first OC fic in this fandom, so uh... Actually I have no idea what to say about that.

“I don’t know,” Alice says, “what I’m doing anymore.”

She throws an arm over her eyes so she doesn’t have to look at the world, and so it doesn’t get to look at her either, because Alice can feel a hot moisture building behind her eyelids. This wasn’t the plan, she wants to say aloud, but doesn’t, because it was exactly the plan. She just hadn’t counted on… On what? Getting attached?

She played the part so well, sometimes even Alice forgot she wasn’t really an ice-cold bitch.

“You know exactly what you’re doing,” a gentle voice interjects from the doorway. “It’s just hard.”

“Hard?” Alice snorts, pursing her lips into a scowl. “It’s not hard.”

“Yes, it is,” the voice argues back, closer than before.

A hand smooths across the top of Alice’s head, weaving through her hair.

“It’s hard,” the voice repeats, “because you want to protect those kids, but you know that following that protective instinct just puts everyone in more danger. It’s hard because you blame yourself for getting them involved in the first place.”

The hand slips from Alice’s hair, skimming down her cheek. A thumb brushes teasingly over her glossed bottom lip. But then, the hand takes a gentle grip on her own hand, pulling Alice’s arm away from her eyes and revealing her face fully.

“Sera,” Alice murmurs, a soft smile crossing her lips despite her intentions.

“I love you,” is Serafina’s reply, before she presses her red lips to Alice’s knuckles.

“You always say that,” Alice answers with a little smirk, knowing the lack of reciprocation will make Serafina pout.

As predicted, her girlfriend’s too-red lips curl into a childish pucker, her cheeks puffing out. Overwhelmed, suddenly, by adoration, Alice draws Serafina close to her – wrapping her free arm around the other woman’s back – so that their lips are nearly touching.

“I love you,” Alice allows herself to breathe at last, lost in the sunlit depths of Serafina’s chestnut eyes.

The words pull the tension from her very shoulders, but they do not erase the squeeze of fear, of guilt, in Alice’s chest. And Serafina is right. She knows, always knows, whatever it is that’s closest to Alice’s heart, the things she hides from everyone.

“You can only do your best, Alice,” Serafina consoles her, pressing a soft and reassuring kiss to Alice’s waiting lips. “You offered them positions in the SOIS, but they accepted. You trained them, but they learned.”

That isn’t the point, Alice wants to argue. Because when her eyes ease closed at Serafina’s kisses, all she can see behind her eyelids is how very small and fragile her Espers look. The determination in Clover’s face doesn’t negate the way the girl’s fingers tremble, doesn’t erase the way Alice has seen some of the other Espers go deathly pale upon catching sight of Gentarou Hongou being marched down the hall to his cell. It doesn’t erase the fact that the second any of them goes on a field mission, it is out of her hands. And the higher ups want them on field missions. Soon.

Because agents who can communicate without speech, across long distances, would be invaluable in the field. But they’re not doing this for a vendetta, the way Alice is, and she’s not willing to sacrifice children to get her father back. What good would it do her then, to recover one person only to lose another? No one life was worth another – people couldn’t be traded like currency, and even if they could Alice knows it is something her father would never accept. To live because a child died in his place.

“What do I do if they get hurt…?” Alice asks, burying her face in Serafina’s pale neck. “What do I do if they die?”

“You mourn,” Serafina answers softly, playing with the ends of Alice’s hair. “Because you love them.”

And it’s true, and Alice knows it’s true, but that doesn’t make it easier. Maybe that even makes it more difficult. Because the truth is that Serafina knows that that is how it goes by experience – by losing others. They’ve both lost comrades, partners, before – it was something that had brought them together, that pain. But Alice has never lost anyone that felt so young to her. The Espers are _so young_ , only children. Barely into their adulthood, barely into their lives. It would be like losing a little sibling, or your own child. They have been directly under Alice’s command since the beginning, and that makes them _hers_ – her Espers. There’s obligation there, and duty, and… Love. There is love there, if she’s honest with herself the way Serafina is honest with her; something Alice so rarely is.

Serafina squeezes Alice’s manicured fingertips gently, bringing her back to reality.

“Right now,” says Serafina, “they are safe. Right now, everything is fine. So please don’t worry yet. Right now, it’s just you, and me, here, in this moment, and everything is fine.”

Alice’s mind is still threatening to spin into tomorrow, next week, a few months from now, whenever the Espers are sent from her sight—but Serafina’s plea reels her back in like a lifeline. For the moment, everything is ok. Everything is as it should be. The woman she loves is in her arms, and Alice has nowhere else she would rather be.

“What did I do to deserve you?” Alice wonders with a soft laugh.

Serafina’s reply is honest, straightforward, heartfelt – an immediate contrast to Alice’s tender joking.

“You made me smile again. I will always love you for that.”

Alice gently frees her hand from Serafina’s grip and laces their fingers together. You are the only truth I admit to myself, she wants to say. The mask only comes off for you. You’re the thought that keeps me warm when what I have decided to do has made me so, so cold. But Alice can’t find the voice for any of these things. Instead, she presses her lips to Serafina’s jaw, to the jagged scar that bisects the left side of her lover’s face. The soft sound that leaves Serafina’s lips makes Alice’s heart squeeze sharply in her chest.

“Thank you,” she manages to breathe past the tightness in her throat.

Thank you for smiling that day, thank you for being here now, thank you for knowing the kind of person I am and not looking away. Thank you for even existing at all. The tender look in Serafina’s eyes tells Alice that she has heard all these unsaid things.

“You’re welcome,” Serafina replies like a joke, a heady warmth in her voice.

And, if only for that night, in a hotel in Nevada, there is no one else in the world but the two of them.


End file.
